A Recipe for Survival

Your stomach hurts because all you’ve eaten this week is frozen yogurt—but it is a hurt you can bear more than hunger.

1. Take one box of off-brand mac and cheese from the outreach center that’s open during the day, the place you visit in a faded Florida town when you’re hungry and have left the shelter with a few other homeless teenagers who outstayed their welcome, so you all pool your earnings from your minimum-wage jobs to rent an apartment in a sprawling complex of gray blocks next to a discount grocery store, where sometimes your boyfriend will try to shove a steak down the front of his pants because, hey, if we have to steal something to eat, it might as well be something good.

2. Scan the shelves at the outreach center, find a box of chicken stock leaning in close to its expiration date, and decide it will take the place of milk because milk is for people who can afford fresh groceries and not kids who were kicked out of their homes because they are gay or pregnant or not what their parents wanted, or kids who have fled abuse they can no longer endure so they take on pain by another name, or people like you who fear that history will repeat and slice its stiff hand across your face.

3. Discover a can of peas hiding behind a package of dried ramen noodles and imagine how green would brighten up a meal and provide vitamins that might fend off visits to the free clinic, where old people and young people and toddlers wait hours for a five-minute visit with a doctor; where you wait, too, because you can barely breathe; where you see the boy from the shelter who’s lost at least twenty pounds since you last saw him; where you leave with a whispered wish to never return to the free clinic again.

4. Remember you need something to cook food in, and spot an only-slightly-dented pot with a charred bottom and take it after the volunteer shrugs and says, I guess when you ask her if you can please add it to your pile.

5. Put the mac and cheese and chicken stock and peas in a plastic grocery sack the volunteer finds in a back room, but carry the dented pot on its own because it will not fit in the bag, noticing how its metal flares in the sun as you wait at the bus stop.

6. Ride the bus back to your apartment with the change you gathered from the tip jar last night at the frozen yogurt shop where you work for minimum wage and freeze frozen yogurt pies that you take home to feed your roommates once the rent is paid and there is no money left, even though your stomach hurts because all you’ve eaten this week is frozen yogurt—but it is a hurt you can bear more than hunger.

7. Realize you need utensils and send your roommate over to the fast food joint by the discount grocery store for plastic take-out spoons, because he lived on the streets far longer than you and either he is much better than you are at taking things he shouldn’t, or he just doesn’t care if he’s seen.

8. Submerge the macaroni in boiling water in the dented pot and, while it cooks, borrow a can opener from a neighbor you’ve never spoken to before who grumbles when you force a smile, so you can add the can of peas to the macaroni once it has softened and you’ve drained the water in the sink by holding the macaroni back with plastic spoons because you don’t have a strainer or a lid for the pot.

9. Add the chicken stock, swirl it around, and ask your roommates to sit in a circle on the orange-shag carpet in the living room because you don’t have chairs or a table, and gift each roommate a spoon after you place the pot in the center and your boyfriend calls the concoction “Airman’s Stew” not knowing that, years later, your spouse will be an actual airman and you will live on military bases and you will drive to a warehouse in Biloxi to collect boxes of shelf-stabilized milk with your WIC check to make mac and cheese for your baby girl.

10. Take turns scooping out warm mouthfuls of whatever it is you’ve just made with the plastic spoons and notice how surprisingly good it tastes, how it fills your empty stomach, and nod yes when one of your roommates says it is the most delicious Christmas Day meal she can remember.

Dorothy Bendel's work can be found in The New York Times, The Rumpus, Microchondria II: 42 More Short-Short Stories Collected by Harvard Book Store, and additional publications. Find her at dorothybendel.com or @DorothyBendel